ABSTRACT
Arabic enjoys special status in the study of language. Especially in the areas of morphology and phonology, several key notions of modern theory have been originally proposed on the basis of Arabic or have been sharpened by research on Arabic. These include the consonantal root, the notion of template and its related parameters of association, morpheme structure constraints, and the contrast between categorical and gradient phonotactics in grammar. As in other languages with rich inflectional morphology, Arabic organizes words in paradigms. The chapter shows that several perspectives are contrasted by reviewing their accounts for a number of phenomena in the morphology and phonology of Arabic. Every Arabic stem must be realized in two related inflectional paradigms, the perfect and the imperfect. A key fact is that the perfect is prefixless, but the imperfect supplies prefixes ending in vowels.
